Blackboard Trend Report: 4/20/2018

Looking to learn more about what’s trending in education? Here’s a recap of some of this week’s top education news. Let us know what you think about this week’s news in the comments below.

100 Top Colleges Vow To Enroll More Low-Income StudentsNPR…Their goal? Enroll 50,000 additional low- and moderate-income students by 2025. Each school has its own goals, too — many want to increase the number of Pell Grant students on campus, others aim to improve graduation rates — but they’re all on board to share strategies, learn from each other’s missteps and provide data to monitor their progress.

Maryland Schools May Tell Children When It’s Time to Log OffNew York TimesMaryland could become the first state to address parental concerns about computer screen time for children in the classroom. Legislation passed this month would require state education officials to develop optimum health and safety practices for the use of digital devices in schools.

Leaders discuss ‘rebooting’ higher ed to remain competitiveEducation DiveColleges and universities are on track to produce 11 million fewer credentialed individuals than the workforce will need by 2025, Dan Greenstein, a senior strategy adviser with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said Tuesday in an ASU+GSV session on how institutions are radically “rebooting” themselves to serve more students at lower costs. “This is a problem of epic proportions,” he said, adding that it’s an issue of equity as well as workforce demands.

New Report Sheds Light on Higher Ed’s Innovation ChallengesEdSurgeA new report surveying academic administrators released Wednesday by the Online Learning Consortium and Learning House sheds some insight on innovation challenges at higher education institutions. Among the report’s findings are that 91 percent of the administrators responding to the survey said that innovation “is stated as a priority in either their strategic or academic plans, or both documents.” By contrast, just 40 percent of survey respondents said they have a “dedicated budget for innovation.”

What Principals Really Think About TechEducation WeekAs digital devices and social-media platforms become an ever-larger part of children’s lives, the nation’s school principals find themselves in an uncomfortable—if familiar—bind. On one hand, principals say they’re worried about technology’s potentially harmful effects: A full 95 percent believe their students are using screens too much at home, and 97 percent say they’re at least “mildly concerned” about how students use social media outside of school, according to a new national survey of school-based leaders conducted by the Education Week Research Center

For-profit colleges lose when two-year colleges offer B.A. degreesHechinger Report… Now a team of University of Florida researchers has looked back at the results of this experiment and come to a surprising conclusion: four-year state schools actually saw an increase in business even as two-year institutions expanded into their terrain. But for-profit, private universities generally took a big hit.

Battle over college course material is a textbook example of technological changeWashington PostA revolution in college course materials is raising questions about cost, access and fairness. Publishers say their high-tech courseware — electronic books glowing with videos and interactive study guides — can improve the quality of learning at a small fraction of the cost of traditional textbooks. But student advocates call for adoption of open-source textbooks that can be downloaded for free, and worry that the same companies that drove up the price of print textbooks are dominating the digital space and will ultimately introduce higher costs there.

Don’t look to Congress, HEA reauthorization to solve higher ed’s quandaries, experts sayEducation Dive A group of higher education leaders at the Ronald Reagan Institute Summit on Education held Thursday in Washington, D.C. concluded that as a whole, the industry is performing at a C- to C level. More specifically, Arizona State University President Michael Crow said, the industry is struggling to maintain that C-, citing “a failed academic culture that we’ve got to attack and address and modernize” adding “we’re not prepared to educate people over the course of a lifetime.”